Ergo review

Ergo is a tool that lets you use several search engines at once and then view all the results by category, allowing you to instantly hone in on the kind of content you want.

Rather than appearing as a search box on your Windows Desktop or Taskbar, Ergo opens in its own customised browser window. When you enter a word or phrase, it looks for it on Windows Live Search, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia and Windows Desktop Search.

You can choose any combination of these search sites, and the results are sorted for you. If you search for Ford, Ergo will return groups of pages about Henry Ford himself, Ford Motors, the Model T and so on. This is a neat way of zeroing in only just the type of content you were looking for and filtering out irrelevant information, while ensuring you don't miss anything relevant.

Rather than being displayed as a list, groups of results can be shown as a map of linked circles, three dimensional cubes, a multi-coloured grid and so on. Once you click on a search group, the pages within the group are displayed as a set of stacked windows for you to scroll through. You can also choose to display greater detail on each page in the pane at the bottom of the program. As well as simply searching, you can annotate and save pages, email them to other users, or save them in the new XPS format, Microsoft's equivalent of Adobe PDF.

The interface is simple and attravailable, and the principle behind the program is sound. The way results are grouped does help to find what you want much faster. However, the software had a few quirks that we weren't thrilled about. You can't add a search engine of your own to the list (Ask.com or AltaVista, for instance). The interface was at times slightly sluggish, and we couldn't search just for image files, music files or whatever.

Our main beef, however, is that the program is too expensive. £25 is far too much to have to pay for a browser plug-in, even one with as many good features as this.